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May 13, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender
01:09:38
Path To Peace Episode Two

Robert F. Kennedy Jr discusses the pathway to peace in the Middle East with John Aziz and Einat Wilf in this episode.

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Hey everybody, it's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
here, and this is the second in our series, A Path to Peace.
I've been very, very much looking forward to this, probably more than any of my podcasts ever, because I have such enormous respect for the two people who are guests today, and for their willingness to actually come together and talk about The issue of how we achieve a path to peace in the Mideast,
both of them have shown extraordinary courage, but also thoughtfulness and a very, very high regard for truth and for History and trying to do what my uncle President Kennedy said, which if you want to have peace, you better be able to put yourself in the shoes of your adversary and understand their worldview.
And what we see in the Mideast today is, as much as anything, it's a clash of narratives.
And part of the path to peace is being able to deconstruct those narratives to find a Commonly agreed on facts and then trying to understand how we can build peace based upon those kind of indisputable facts.
And both of these guests, coming from different backgrounds, very different backgrounds of this conflict, have spent their lifetimes and their careers doing exactly that.
John Aziz is a British-Palestinian writer, musician, and peace advocate with a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
His work has appeared in The Atlantic, in Foreign Policy, The Dispatch, and many, many others.
He is currently working on a book chronicling the modern and ancient history of Palestine and the intertwining histories of the Jewish and Palestinian people.
Dr.
Einat Wolf is a leading thinker on Israel, Zionism, foreign policy, and education.
She was a member of the Israeli parliament from 2010 to 2013, where she served as chair of the Education Committee and a member of the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
Born and raised in Israel, Dr.
Wilf served as an intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, a foreign policy advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and a strategic consultant with McKinsey.
Dr.
Wilf has a BA from Harvard, an MBA from INSEED in France, and a PhD in political science from the University of Cambridge.
She was the Goldman Visiting Professor at Georgetown University.
Dr.
Wilf is the author of seven books that explore key issues in Israeli society.
We Should All Be Zionists, published in 2022.
Brings together her essays from the past four years on Israel, Zionism, and the path to peace.
And co-authored The War of Return, our Western intelligence agency's How Western Indulgence, the Palestinian Dream, has obstructed the path to peace, which was published in 2020, and in my view,
is probably the most important book written on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I've read dozens of them, but I... I think reading that book is a necessity for anybody who really wants to understand the potential paths to peace.
And the reason for that is that Dr.
Wilf is one of the few...
People who really have deconstructed the conflict in a way that identifies the major impediments to peace in ways that have never been done, which is really the right of return on all other You show in that book in an extraordinary persuasive way that all the territorial claims,
the water claims, all of the other, electricity, the rights, all of those things can be solved.
The one issue that It is seldom debated in the open for a variety of reasons, but is the real issue of obstruction, is the right of return.
And I want to return to that in a second.
I want to start by talking to John Aziz.
John, I haven't met you.
It's a pleasure.
It's a real pleasure.
You know, you did a terrific article in December that appeared in the Dispatch.
I just want to talk about a few of the facts that you identify here.
These are polls that were recently taken of Palestinian citizens by Palestinian researchers.
And they show that 75% of Palestinians support the October 7th terrorist attack.
And 90% believe coexistence between Israel and Palestinians is impossible.
The same study found that 75% of Palestinians believe that they will repel the ongoing ground offensive and win the war against Israel.
90% of the people in Gaza in the same survey supported a ceasefire.
However, the vast majority want to fight Israel and believe themselves capable of military victory.
And you suggest that the support of the ceasefire is a, I won't call it a ruse, but a strategy to give the Palestinians a respite, civilians a respite from war, and more importantly, to give Hamas a chance to recalibrate, to rearm and to continue attacking Israel.
In Gaza, support for Hamas remains overwhelmingly high.
89% of respondents expressed support for the al-Qassam brigades, which is Hamas's armed wings.
That's 89% and 84% expressed word for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group.
About three in four expressed support for the political wing of Hamas, compared to only 23 We'll back Hamas' main political rival, Fatah, which is, of course, a secular group and less intent on at least open jihad and the annihilation of Israel, which Hamas is openly committed to.
So let's talk about the ideology of this and why Palestinians feel that way.
And you offer kind of a confluence of the extraordinary trauma that they've been through and ingrained anti-Semitism, which is still very, very at the surface, according to Poles.
And some other reasons.
So let's talk about your perspective.
So I think the first thing I would need to say is that with those polls, which are a few months old, it is important to caveat that it's very, very difficult to poll the population in the middle of a war.
And it is quite plausible that when people were answering those polls, they were concerned that rather than it being a pollster asking the questions, maybe it was someone from Hamas trying to find out if they're a traitor to Hamas's I personally, of course, I'm a very strong advocate for peace and coexistence, and that's the direction I want us to move in.
But as you rightly suggested, those polls are very concerning reading, very concerning to hear if you are someone who is advocating for long-term peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
So I think Hamas have done a very effective job Painting peace is a dirty word.
And they've very effectively exploited the relatively legitimate Palestinian grievances.
You know, there's a whole catalogue of Palestinian grievances with Israel, some of which are legitimate and some of which are less legitimate.
But Hamas certainly have exploited the legitimate grievances of Palestinians.
You know, the Palestinian right to self-determination, the right to have a state, the right to be...
A people who are, you know, represented on the world stage and able to live a normal life with, you know, economic development and economic growth.
Hamas is exploiting these, you know, legitimate grievances, the things that Palestinians lack, and they're turning it towards this dream of destroying Israel and capturing all of the land between the river and the sea for their dream and their vision for an Islamic theocracy.
So that's something that they've done very effectively.
And their long-term vision in fighting Israel is to use terrorism to repeat the October 7th massacre again and again and again until Israel's destroyed.
So, you know, as someone who believes that both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people have a legitimate right to be there, as someone who believes that neither side's going anywhere...
Realistically in the long term, this is very, very concerning.
It's difficult and it's unfortunately this quagmire that we found ourselves in is contributing to a huge amount of death.
And war after war after war, you know, it was the 2014 war, the 2018 war, the 2021 war, and now this, the biggest war so far between Israel and Hamas.
And I think if we want to have peace and coexistence, if we recognise the legitimacy of both Israelis and Palestinians, We absolutely need to go beyond where we are now and to have a paradigm shift in the way we're looking at this.
And as you rightly suggest, those polls are a very difficult place to start from.
And Dr.
Wilf, how do you react to that kind of polling?
And let's start talking about what the path to peace might be.
So I'll start from the end vision that I share with John very much.
The idea that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea live two distinct collectives, peoples, nations that have a distinct sense of collective identity.
Sometimes I joke, you know, there are Jews, there are Arabs, there are Israelis, Palestinians that claim that the other is not a people, that the other is not a nation.
And I always joke, can we just agree that both of them seem to violently agree that we're not the other.
So there's two clear collectives with a very different sense of collective self, and I believe that both of them have the right to self-determination, meaning that both of them have the right to govern themselves by themselves in a political entity that governs part of the territory between the river and the sea.
That is the foundational idea of the two-state solution.
So that is indeed the vision for peace.
And the question is then, how do we get there?
And here the causality, and that is also to the question of Hamas.
Hamas at the end of the day is merely the most brutal, most recent representative of the The Arab-Palestinian vision that the Jews as a people, and often there's a denial that there's a people, have a historic connection to the land and that by virtue of that historic collection and them being a people, they have the right to self-determination.
So if you go in the past century, there's actually not a single moment long before Hamas exists where there's an Arab-Palestinian leadership That fully and completely recognizes the Jewish right to self-determination with all the implications,
meaning there's no return into the sovereign state of Israel because you acknowledge that it's going to be the sovereign state of the Jewish people, that people living in Gaza and the West Bank are actually not refugees because they're already living in Palestine and that's where their future is.
So that has only ever been really the causal issue.
And in that sense, what a lot of Palestinians saw on October 7, and this is the tragedy, our tragedy, their tragedy, is they saw Hamas carry out their dream.
And this is a dream that has been groomed for 75 years, the dream of return, which was never a nostalgic or an innocent idea.
It was one that if you look at the texts going back to the 50s, the 60s, again, long before Hamas exists, they're described as the violent triumph over the Jewish state.
We will tear their hearts out of their bodies.
So the causality is actually reversed.
The reason that there are Palestinian grievances, like John described, that there's no state, no self-determination, is because at every juncture, when Palestinians could have had their own state, going back to the 1937, the Arabs of the mandate could have had going back to the 1937, the Arabs of the mandate could have had their own state, but the price with the Jews would also At least to date, the vision was not good enough from the river to the sea.
So what so many Palestinians saw on October 7th, they saw the realization of the vision of this violent triumph over the Jewish state.
And you saw the exhilaration in the streets that came from the understanding that That this is it.
This is what we've been waiting for.
We've been waiting for that moment of triumph.
And it felt, and for many, it still feels like it's in hand.
You take any optimism from the fact that Palestinians within Israel, who are citizens, the 1.8 million Palestinians who live in Israel, have not reacted in that way, generally speaking.
This is indeed an important moment, and you're right, it's a hopeful moment, that has also been building for a while.
Israel's Arab citizens, by and large, actually, identify the vast majority as Arab citizens.
They especially since the Abraham Accords, those normalization agreements between Israel and several Gulf countries and Morocco, they actually increasingly Identify themselves with Israel and we even had an Arab-Israeli political leader,
Mansour Abbas, who as a result of the Abraham Accords broke with the traditional Arab parties that are traditionally anti-Zionist, even though they are within the Parliament of Israel, within the Knesset.
And he said, he said, Israel is a Jewish state.
It will remain a Jewish state.
We want to make sure that we get our fair share as a minority, but we are not going to challenge our status as an Arab minority in a Jewish state.
We see a vision of the Jewish state becoming part of the region as more successful Arab countries are letting go of decades of anti-Zionism as a crutch against the grievances of their own people.
So after October 7th, this already being the background, a lot of Israel's Arab citizens saw with horror what the alternative could be.
And I think many of them recoiled from that and basically made their choice on that day, almost a visceral, instinctive choice, that they are truly Arab citizens of the Jewish state and Without seeking to undo the Jewish state,
I think this is a remarkable moment whereby the Jewish majority should make sure to grasp that moment and to really use it as an opportunity to secure the Arab-Israeli belonging to the Jewish state.
And so the audience is one of 10 Palestinian Arabs who serve in the Knesset.
A lot of people don't know that Arabs, because of the kind of propaganda, that there are Arab judges at every level of the courts, including the Supreme Court in Israel, Four years ago, an Arab district court convicted and sentenced a former Israeli prime minister to seven years in prison for corruption, and that decision was upheld by the Supreme Court, including the Arab member of the Supreme Court.
John, when you see what's happening in Israel with the Arabs who live in Israel, who are citizens like Mansour Abbas, do you see that as a kind of model for the future?
What is your take on that?
Because there weren't large protests, at least violent protests, among Arab Israelis like there were in the West Bank and Gaza.
What's your take on that?
Well, I think that...
All the evidence is quite strong that Arab Israelis are very well integrated into the population of the State of Israel.
And I'm sort of coming at this from the perspective of we're all humans.
We're all human beings.
Yes, there are different countries.
There's Great Britain, there's France, there's the United States, there's Israel, there's Saudi Arabia.
All countries are different and all countries have a different ethnic makeup.
But everyone who lives somewhere should feel at home Where they live.
And they should feel well integrated and they should be made welcome.
And eventually, I hope one day there is a Palestinian state which will also make Jewish people feel welcome, you know, if they want to live there.
Yes, they would be living in Palestine.
They wouldn't necessarily be Israeli.
They'd be Palestinian Jews.
But that's the kind of model that I want to see.
Is one where minorities are respected, protected, and treated with all the same rights and responsibilities as any other human being.
Do either of you think that the objective of peace is likely to move forward with Netanyahu in charge?
And, you know, what...
What kind of future do you see in Israel?
Is it likely that some other government will replace Netanyahu that is more welcoming of peace?
Let me start with you, Dr.
Wilf, and then I'll ask John to answer the same question.
So I actually put very little stock in leaders in this case.
I think the bigger issue is the one of numbers.
At the end of the day, the Jewish people are destined or damned, choose your word, to remain a minute person.
Ethnic, linguistic, national, and religious minority in an overwhelming Arab and Muslim Middle East.
Sometimes I tell the story that in 1948, when Israel was established, the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the region is 1 to 50%.
So Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, calls on Jews to immigrate.
More than 3 million Jews come to Israel during its existence.
Huge success.
He calls upon us to make babies.
We're a very fertile country.
We're more than 10 times the numbers of Jews that we were in 1948.
And the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the region is 1 to 60.
So they've been busy too.
And there's essentially no amount of immigration or procreation that would ever change that ratio.
The Jews will remain a minority.
The Arab and Muslim conquests of the 7th century have been hugely successful, so kudos to God.
We're going to be a minority.
And because we're a minority, we try to pretend we're big and strong.
But at the end of the day, we're a minute minority in the region.
And apropos what John said, certainly for a while, not a region that has been welcoming to unarmed minorities.
So we will always compromise.
And it actually doesn't matter who the prime minister is.
Left-wing, right-wing, we had left-wing governments, right-wing governments.
Whenever Israel was faced with a clear choice, not air talk, but real choice, It can have peace, and sometimes even less than that.
But it will mean some form of compromise, territorial compromise.
Israel always said yes, because foundationally the purpose of the Jewish people in the land was sovereignty, is to establish a Jewish state.
Sometimes I use a quote by Ernst Bevin, the British foreign minister after World War II, when he describes the conflict.
Now, this is February 47.
There's no state of Israel.
There are no Arab refugees.
There's no settlements.
There's no occupation.
And he calls the conflict in February of 47 irreconcilable.
He goes on to say there are Jews and Arabs in the land, and each one of them has a top priority.
He says for the Jews, the top priority is to establish a state.
They want self-determination.
And for the Arabs in the land, he says the top priority is to prevent to the last the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of the land.
So this is irreconcilable.
He's not saying the Jews want a state, the Arabs want a state, like the vision that John and I share.
He says the Jews want a state, and the Arabs of the land, the Palestinians, as a top priority, want the Jews not to have a state.
If you want to have peace, that has to go away.
There has to be an Arab-Palestinian vision that says we want to live next to the Jewish state rather than from the river to the sea, rather than instead of it.
And I can assure you, Because the Jews are a minute people and minority in the region, given a true opportunity for peace, given an opportunity by the Arab world telling us this is enough,
we're done, we accept you not as white European colonial foreign crusader interlopers, but as Abraham, as people who have a history and belong here and we want to live next to you as equals, Whatever government will have will say yes, and if they won't say yes, they'll be thrown out.
Because again, the vast majority of Israelis understand our status as a minority in the region, and we will always compromise.
And let me ask you about Netanyahu, John, and then I want a follow-up question to Dr.
Wilf.
So I, yeah, as a Palestinian, I'm obviously not a huge fan of Netanyahu.
I do think he's probably, we can say he's been more of an obstacle than a helper towards the kind of vision of coexistence that I have in my head.
But at the same time, I think it's very important for Palestinians to be willing to work with and compromise with whoever's in office at the time.
And I don't think that it's helpful or it's conducive to long-term peace and coexistence to write off the person in office.
I think you have to be open and you have to be willing to take proactive steps down the line towards That long-term vision of peace and coexistence.
So yes, I think we should be willing to try to make peace with Netanyahu.
We should be willing to try to make peace with whoever comes after Netanyahu.
I certainly think Netanyahu probably will not be in office for much longer.
One of the reasons behind that is the security failures on October 7th.
And I would also argue that the war since October the 7th has not been prosecuted particularly effectively or well.
I think Israelis are going to be quite frustrated with that.
I think it's quite likely then that Netanyahu does lose the next election, who he loses the election to.
I don't know.
But I would say that from my perspective, it's very important that whoever is the next Israeli prime minister, we try to take proactive steps towards peace, coexistence, two states and normalization.
There are clear statements by Netanyahu, who authorized at least a billion and a half, maybe $5 billion in payments from the Qataris to Hamas or to Gaza and Hamas, that his purpose was to strengthen Hamas And to divide the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, from Hamas and make it impossible to have a peace agreement.
And this isn't speculation.
Netanyahu is clear about that as his objective.
So I would say to Israelis who are thinking of who to vote for the next election, if you don't like Hamas, then consider voting against Netanyahu.
I mean, one of the problems that I think Dr.
Wolf evokes in her book in a very, very clear way is that no Palestinian leader can really survive if they say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, which implies that That they have a right to sovereignty over their own immigration policy,
and they can decide who comes in and who can't, which means that they can exclude the descendants of the 750,000 refugees who left in 1948.
And would you agree with that, that if you're a Palestinian, either in the West Bank, Or in Gaza, and you say, honestly, we want peace with Israel.
We want to live side by side with the Jewish state.
Your life would be very, very short.
I would tend to agree that it's an extremely controversial position for any Palestinian to take.
I can take it perhaps more easily because I'm a diaspora Palestinian, and I'm raised in the UK on, you know...
Western secular liberal values.
So that's kind of what I've taken to heart.
And I've tried as best as I can to understand the history of the Jewish people and the history of Zionism and why Zionism happened and tried to be able to see the conflict from both sides.
And I would strongly encourage Israelis to do the same thing and try and see it from the Palestinian perspective too.
But no, you're exactly right.
If you try and take my stance in the West Bank, that would be an extremely controversial thing to do.
And you could potentially be dealing with death threats and, you know, being called a traitor and potentially even being killed and potentially, you know, kidnapped by Hamas or whatnot.
So it's quite difficult for a Palestinian.
I grew up hearing, you know, people in my own Palestinian community calling Abu Mezan, Mahmoud Abbas, a traitor because he...
And the positions he takes are maybe considerably more...
Towards the Palestinian mainstream than mine.
So, you know, this is something that's been going on for years.
Some people even called Arafat a traitor.
And, you know, they call the Palestinian Authority today traitors.
They call other Palestinians who take similar stances to me, you know, people like Ahmad Fuad al-Khatib or Hamza Hawidi, you know, Palestinians who've spoken out For peace in Western mainstream media, they also get called traitors.
So it's a slippery slope, and it can be very intimidating, and it causes people to withdraw from the sphere.
And I think mass intimidation as a strategy against people who express dissident views is very dangerous because there is an important principle of free speech and people should be able to advocate for the positions they believe in.
And this position that I believe in of co-indigeneity and the right of both people to co-exist I believe it from the bottom of my heart.
So no, I'm not going to be intimidated or driven out of this debate because, you know, it's so tremendously important to me that we settle these issues and we stop killing each other because the death of children in Gaza is abominable.
It's an abomination.
The death of children on October the 7th for Jewish children and the rape of Jewish women was an abomination, right?
We don't want innocent people to die.
So that's why I... Particularly feel particularly strongly about this issue and have been willing to speak publicly about it because I want a solution.
I want people to live together as decent human beings.
And you're right, it is tremendously difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank who may agree with me.
And I have plenty of reports from my Palestinian friends that there are Palestinians who do agree with me.
Right?
But they do it undercover.
I speak to plenty of Israelis who have gone around and spoken to, you know, fairly moderate Palestinians, and they say to me, I speak to lots of Palestinians like you, John, who have the same perspectives, but they don't do it publicly.
So, you know, at some point, when it comes to something as important as coexistence and as important as being able to live together without killing each other, I think we have to be courageous.
We have to take a step towards doing the thing that we believe in, because if nobody stands up for what they believe in, then tyrants will stomp us all into the dirt.
Yeah, you know...
After the failure of the Oslo Accords and then the second Camp David and Clinton's agreement where Clinton strong-armed Ehud Barak to give everything to the Palestinian leadership that they had asked for, including back to the 67 borders and except for a little tiny band of settlements around Tel Aviv and then to make up for that 3% of Israeli land and Arafat walked away from it
and later explained to Prince Bandar, who was one of the referees of that agreement, that if he had signed it, his own people would have killed him.
And it's kind of a trap because ever since the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, who was an ally of Hitler and The riots against the initial in 1937 and later the initial proposals to give the Israelis a state, to give the Jews a state.
Ever since then, Arab leaders have kept themselves in office using that tool of anti-Semitism and this just blanket denial of the existence of the possibility of a Jewish state of any size.
But it's been a trap for them.
It keeps them in office, but it's a trap because when they do try to actually be peacemakers, then that popular belief that there is no possibility of a Jewish state comes up and they will likely die.
I mean, is that a kind of analysis that you would agree with?
Yeah, I think that I come from a sort of different generation, perhaps to people who are of an older generation to me.
And from my perspective, I've seen enough wars and enough struggle and enough attempts to superimpose this vision of from the river to the sea to understand that it's not working.
And it is probably never going to work because I think Israel is very secure.
I think Israel is a successful, modern, first-world economy.
Just for context, Israel has a higher GDP per capita than the United Kingdom where I live, France, Germany.
Israel as a state is an economic miracle, and I don't think that...
Generations of Palestinians sacrificing themselves on the battlefield is going to shift Israel.
I don't think it's going to push Israelis into surrendering to some, you know, Hamas vision of Islamic theocracy where Jewish people become dimmies.
So for people who don't know that term, that's the...
The status is sort of a second-class status that is part of the Koran, the original conquest of the Holy Land of Palestine.
In the 7th century, Jews were relegated to second-class citizenship, and the term for that was dimming.
They had to pay higher taxes.
They didn't get the same kind of hearings in law courts, and they were subservient in every way to their Muslim neighbors.
So what I've seen in my lifetime is that the ideology of Hamas and the ideology of from the river to the sea and snuffing out the Jewish state has not worked.
And, you know, from my perspective, it seems like neither people are going anywhere, because Palestinians aren't going anywhere either.
Palestinians have, you know, long and deep roots in the land.
I'm from peasant farmers in the West Bank, you know, who've been on the land for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And there's plenty of people like me, right, who have, you know, many hundreds of years of history in the land.
And some of them, of course, are even people whose ancestors converted from Judaism to Islam or Christianity.
So I don't think Palestinians are going anywhere either.
I think I've made peace with the idea in my own head that there is going to be a state called Israel.
It is going to be the Jewish state.
And I want to coexist alongside it.
And I think, realistically, I think a lot of Arab leaders understand this.
I think the King of Jordan understands it.
I think the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia understands it.
I don't think that they believe that Israel is suddenly going to vanish and disappear.
I believe the leaders of the UAE understand it.
And they understand the dangers of extremist, theocratic versions of Islam among their own populations.
And they I think a lot of the Arab leadership in the region, they don't want to live The way it is in Yemen, right, in a civil war, or the way it is in Syria, or the way it is in Lebanon, right?
There is a class of leadership in these Arab countries who understand that if you have this ultra extreme theocratic vision of what an Arab state or what a Muslim state should be like, it leads to Muslims and Arabs oppressing each other and killing each other.
You know, that's the reality in Yemen, for example, in Syria.
There's plenty of Arab states where the people are killing each other over their varying visions.
So there is a new class of moderate Arab leadership in the region emerging that understands the dangers of radical Islam and understands that what the Iranian regime is pushing is ultimately poisonous and understands that Israel's not going anywhere.
So that's where I'm setting out my territory.
I want To support moderate leadership that wants modernisation, peace, economic growth, not endless religious wars.
We saw what that's like in Europe for many centuries.
For many centuries, Europeans were killing each other in religious warfare.
Which version of Christianity is...
The correct version of Christianity.
And ultimately what worked out in Europe is the European Union and modernity and secularization.
And I believe that that's the answer for the Middle East.
Dr.
Wilf?
So from which direction would you like me to take it?
I want you to talk about your reactions to that in whatever way.
Will do.
So first I have to say my kind of feeling reaction is that this is the most optimistic vision of the moment that I've heard because the fact that you feel that Israel is strong, competitive, stable, I can assure you, John, this is not the mood right now in Israel.
There is a deep sense of precariousness, A deep sense of being surrounded, a sense that the animosity, the hatred, the commitment to our non-existence is so deep and broad that For a lot of people, it's hard to see a way out.
So your confidence in our future is one of the more optimistic things.
I guess sometimes you need someone from the outside to do it for you.
That's certainly not the mood right now in Israel.
But of course, I share the long-term vision.
I also share the understanding that once you begin to have Arab leaders that want modernity and success and prosperity for their own people, then their attitude to Israel changes almost as a natural outcome then their attitude to Israel changes almost as a natural outcome of
I actually call the Abraham Accords collateral benefit because we're not the central story here, where actually the normalization with Israel is a natural outcome of more successful Arab countries, more visionary, forward, modernizing leaders that are still more visionary, forward, modernizing leaders that are still very much Arab and very much Muslim, who are forging an alternative vision to 9-11 and ISIS and what they realized, and especially, I would say, for young
who are forging an alternative vision to 9-11 and ISIS and what they realized, and especially, I would say, for young Arab men to have a vision that is attractive and that they can have a sense
So it's not a coincidence because if you look historically, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are always the mark of failed societies.
They always rise whenever societies are in crisis and they look for a scapegoat and they look for someone to blame.
So in many ways, you could say that this is the ideology of losers.
And when a society is no longer...
When it actually has leaders that are working for the betterment of their people, they no longer need the Zionist scapegoat, the Jewish scapegoat to divert from their failures because they're no longer failing.
And it's not a coincidence that the more successful Arab leaders and countries are also the ones that have a different attitude to Israel and to Zionism and to the idea of Jewish self-determination.
Which also shows you that being Arab and being Muslim does not necessarily mean that you have to be anti-Zionist.
For a lot of people, this seemed to be for many years, even decades, to be a given.
If you're Arab, if you're Muslim, the automatic position you have to take is to be against Jewish self-determination in the historic homeland, in the land of Israel.
That is, anti-Zionism is the core of an Arab and Muslim identity.
And now finally, and I think actually for the first time ever, certainly since there's Zionism, you have an Arab vision that is proud, successful, forward-looking, modern, and that is pro-Zionist in the sense that they have no problem with the sovereign and that is pro-Zionist in the sense that they have no problem with the sovereign state of the Jewish people acknowledging the history, acknowledging that Israel is not some foreign implant, which is still unfortunately the dominant narrative in the Arab world,
implant, which is still unfortunately the dominant narrative in the Arab world, but rather an expression of the historic connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel.
This is where I find hope.
And this is what I work to.
This is why I call the book We Should All Be Zionists, because I talk about Arab Zionism or Muslim Zionism in the sense, I mean, some people find it kind of very intense, but I was once in a meeting and...
And I said, look, there will only be peace when finally the Arab world, the Muslim world, and especially the Palestinians as their edge there, the tip of the battle, when they will acknowledge the equal right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their historic homeland and part of it.
And someone asked me in a panel, what, do you want Palestinians to be Zionists?
And he made it as if it's a crazy idea.
And I said, look, For an Israeli to be considered pro-peace, moderate, the minimum, the bare minimum, is to recognize the equal right of the Palestinians to self-determination in their homeland.
Again, in part of the land.
Why is it suddenly such a crazy ask that Palestinians will acknowledge the equal right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their historic homeland?
And again, with the understanding that because both of them have a claim, Neither one can have it all, and ultimately they'll have less than everything.
Why is it such a big ask that Palestinians will recognize the equal right of the Jewish people to self-determination?
And that's Zionism.
That's Zionism.
That's where I draw hope.
As long as the Jewish people care about the land of Israel, we are, as I said, destined or damned to remain a Jewish minority in an Arab and Muslim Middle East.
So our only real hope for peace, real peace, is for the Arab and Muslim world to flip the view from the Jewish state as a foreign implant that therefore needs to be thrown out into an indigenous prism that says,
Abraham, the Jewish state, represents a historic connection, and we embrace it as Arabs and Muslims who, from our own history, our own religious texts, recognize that historic connection.
I have a friend A Palestinian friend called Andan Mashouli, who lives in Los Angeles, but he also has a home in the West Bank, and he's a very successful billionaire, born in the West Bank, has a Jordanian passport, a West Bank, I think the old West Bank passport and Israeli passport and U.S. passport.
You know, he's a real Palestinian patriot.
And he remarked to me recently that That there are some forward-thinking Palestinians who understand that it's important to have a strong Jewish state because otherwise the entire region, if you eliminated Israel, the entire region would be dominated by Iran, which most Arabs don't want to see that future either.
And, you know, it used to be that Iraq was a bulwark against Iranian expansion, but Iraq is now a proxy of Iran.
And really, the big bulwark against Iranian expansion in the region, which the Saudis and others have reason to fear, is Israel.
Does that have any kind of resonance with you, John, or with you, Dr.
Wealth?
I think, interestingly, I would tend to say that I would like to be an ally of the Iranian people.
The issue I have with Iran is not the Iranian people.
It's with the Iranian regime.
And funnily enough, the Iranian people also, in many ways, they seem to have an issue with the Iranian regime.
So for me, the issue isn't so much a country.
The issue is tyranny and tyrannical governments.
And the government of Iran is behaving in a tyrannical way, not only over the Iranian people, but also across the entire region.
So I would tend to say that the other states in the Middle East who don't want to fall under the influence of this tyrannical, theocratic regime in Iran, whether that's Saudi Arabia, whether that's Israel, Dr.
whether that's Palestine, whether that's Jordan, whether that's Egypt, they probably should work together to stanch the influence of the Iranian regime.
Dr. Welf?
So I want to put Iran in the context of all the previous kind of supporters that have hid behind the idea of supporting Palestinians, and that was useful for them.
Because what happened really in the last century...
It's because the Arabs of the land, the Palestinians, were fighting not just any Jews.
They were fighting Jews who were seeking dignity, equality, self-determination.
You talked about the deeming status.
They were claiming now to be of equal status, not of lower status.
What happened is...
Because the Palestinians were waging essentially a total war against any sovereign Jewish presence, they always found allies and they were always very useful for every anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist power of the moment.
So in the 30s and 40s, like you mentioned, there is a very close collaboration between the local Arab-Palestinian leadership and the Nazis.
The insertion of a lot of Nazi propaganda in Arabic-speaking radio in the 30s and 40s that has repercussions to the present.
A lot of the Hamas language is actually Nazi language that was inserted in the 30s and 40s.
And the Nazis are defeated and they head to the dustbin of history and they're replaced by the Pan-Arabists who turn anti-Zionism into the marker of what it means to be an Arab, again with sad repercussions, hiding behind the Palestinian issue like you talked about, really making Palestinianism into the secular theology of the Arab Revolution and And then they're defeated and they go to the dustbin of history and they're replaced by the Soviet Union.
And the Soviet Union really uses the mask of supporting for Palestinian rights to take anti-Zionism global.
They insert Zionism as racism into the United Nations in 75 and Israel's apartheid and now genocide.
These are all pages of the Soviet playbook.
And the Soviet Union was defeated and replaced by Iran.
And now Iran presents itself as kind of the protector of Palestinian rights in the same way.
And John spoke about tyranny.
Those are all of the same birds of a feather.
So on the positive side...
What you see here is that all those regimes that hid behind this collaboration, support for Palestinianism, but really it was just anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, they ended up in the dustbin of history.
And I have no doubt, as I look at the predecessors of Iran in that role, that the Mullah regime will also find itself in the dustman of history.
I have no doubt of that, just judging by the history.
The reason that I'm so concerned at the moment and have less of the optimism and sense of Israeli strength that John portrayed is Is that if you look again at all these regimes, is that on the way to the dustbin of history, they caused a lot of damage to the Jews and a lot of mayhem to the world.
So we don't need to expand on the Nazis, but in the two decades when pan-Arabism reigned supreme and it claimed to only be anti-Zionist and have nothing against Jews, within two decades, From Morocco to Afghanistan, no Jews were left.
A complete ethnic cleansing in the name of anti-Zionism.
And then the Soviet Union, we know how it treated its Jews, and we know that the Jews of Iran left as soon as the Ayatollah regime established itself.
And we know that what Iran has been doing to support not just October 7th, but all Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, establishing itself now in Syria, trying to cause mayhem in the West Bank and Jordan.
So my concern right now is until the Mullah regime goes to the dustbin of history, where I'm sure it will be, how much damage to the Jewish people and how much mayhem in general will they cause?
Well, let's talk about the path to peace.
So, you know, I think the point that you made, that both of you made so eloquently, is that if you have a society that's based upon a grievement, we're never going to get there.
And how do we start building institutions and societies in both the West Bank?
You have corporate kleptocracies in both of them that are robbing their own people, that are extraordinarily corrupt.
That are not building democratic institutions and not building economic prosperity.
How do we start building?
I mean, Gaza should be an extraordinary prosperous nation.
It has miles of white sand beaches.
It should be a tourist mecca.
It has the potential for a port that could be the Singapore of the West.
It's at the confluence of the great maritime trade routes from the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean, the terrestrial trade routes between Africa, the Mideast, and Europe.
It has a very innovative population with very good, highly educated, much more than any place else in the Arab world.
It has fertile soils.
It's an oasis with good freshwater resources.
Unlimited potential for desalidization.
How do you shift the leadership away from this ideology of aggrievement toward a pride and a promise for a future?
And what is blocking that, including the United Nations, which really you show how much of an impediment that is, Dr.
Wealth.
Let's go to John first, and then I'm going to let you finish up.
So I think that one of the biggest problems with Gaza, one of many, is the support of Various regimes on the outside of Gaza who have helped the radicals and the extremists take control and take power.
So specifically, I would be talking about, of course, Iran, the IRGC. I'd be talking about Qatar.
Perhaps tangentially, you could add Netanyahu to the list as he seems to like the idea of transferring cash to Hamas because he prefers Hamas to the PA. And the United Nations is one of those.
Right, yes.
I mean, through the instruments of the United Nations.
But the regimes on the outside of Gaza have allowed extremists to gain power within Gaza, and that has been through providing them money, and providing them training, and providing them guns.
And I would suggest that if we want to see peace between Gaza and Israel, and if we want to see Gaza become a successful, prosperous, modernized, thriving society, you know, the Singapore of the West, this is my dream.
I want to see Gaza be that.
I want to see Gaza be filled with skyscrapers like Tel Aviv.
I want to see the Gazan beaches filled with tourists, including tourists from Europe and the United States and Israel.
Why not?
Let them come.
But we need to empower Palestinian moderates.
We need to find Palestinian moderates who want to be leaders, and we need to help them.
Because at this point, Iran and Qatar will help The Palestinians who want to thump their Quran and impose theocracy and discriminate against LGBT people and discriminate against atheists and discriminate against other minorities and spread weird anti-Semitic propaganda.
There's plenty of people who want to help the extremists and will throw money at them in order to do that.
The West has been relatively reticent in helping Palestinian moderates.
If we consider the PA to be relatively moderate, it hasn't been demanding enough of the PA in terms of the reforms required to become a state, such as perhaps abolishing the Martyrs Fund, which rather than paying money to Palestinians in need, pays money to Palestinians on the basis of, you know, did you get put in prison in Israel, right?
Things like the welfare system need to be reformed and modernized.
Things like UNRWA need to be reformed and modernized.
I don't think that...
That's a solution for Palestinians in the long run.
I think the solution ultimately is a self-determining Palestinian state.
But how do we get there?
Part of the problem, as Dr.
Wilf talks about, is that UNRAR is kind of a permanent refugee system where refugee status is inherited generation after generation.
I don't think that's sustainable.
I don't think that that is the future for Palestinians.
I think the future for Palestinians is becoming a fully fledged nation that takes care of itself, that isn't just transferring cash to refugees and educating them on how their home is actually in Haifa or Tel Aviv or Nazareth.
Right.
I think I think I think I think we have the West needs to ask that Palestine is Palestine.
Palestine is the places where...
Palestinians are the majority and eventually we'll become a Palestinian state.
We can't keep Palestinians trapped in this quagmire of eventually you're going to be able to return to Haifa.
Eventually you'll be able to return to Tel Aviv, right?
That's not a long-term solution.
So to sum up, we need to empower Palestinian moderates because, as I say, Iran is already empowering Palestinian extremists.
Yeah, and you know, that summarizes a lot of the, many of the thoughts in Dr.
Welb's book, which is, which I think highlights better than anybody else has that UNRWA, which there's two refugee agencies in the world that the United Nations has, one that takes care of the hundreds of millions of refugees from every nation in the world, except for Palestine.
And then one that is solely designated to take care of Palestinian refugees.
And because of that, that agency has a built-in conflict of interest.
The other United Nations agency actually settles those refugees where they are, helps them build lives, build communities, become parts of whatever state they are that they're in.
And the Refugee status is not inherited generation to generation.
It ends with the people who were actually expelled From that country, none of them go back to their original countries.
That is the history and the custom and the practice.
But in Palestine, they have an agency that actually only survives if the conflict continues, if the aggrievement continues, if the refugees continue to expand.
And you have this very perverse incentive system that actually is inflaming the problem rather than solving it.
And Dr.
Wolf, will you You know, talk about that.
We only have a few minutes left, but I'd love your thoughts about that path to peace.
Certainly.
I think exactly the path to peace includes, in my view, three steps.
Step number one, be very clear on the vision.
Just like John said here, it's a vision where there are two states An Arab-Palestinian state, a Jewish state, Israel.
They can both have minorities.
Israel certainly has.
Like John, I have a vision that a modern Arab-Palestinian state will have a Jewish minority for those that want to live in certain places that are mentioned in the Bible.
They're treated equally as a minority, and they can have whatever trade and economic relations.
And they reflect the self-determination of their people.
Both have a claim, let's say, to all of the land and both recognize that they're just going to have some of it.
That's the end vision and it has to be very clear and it involves the Palestinians essentially letting go of the idea of anti-Zionism as inherent to Palestinian identity.
So it's a foundational flip from an identity that is based on the negation of a Jewish state to one that is based on the construction of an Arab Palestinian state next to a Jewish state without its negation.
So that's the vision.
And there needs to be no cutting corners on that vision because during the 90s, the years of negotiations, there was this notion of constructive ambiguity.
Let's kind of fudge the issues and, you know, get people to sign and then they'll build trust and they'll deal with the difficult issues.
And we know that it was destructive.
So I've become a proponent of constructive specificity.
Let's be very clear.
And I have to emphasize, look, I need zero courage to be here.
John needs a lot.
And John spoke to that.
He says things clearly.
He's not fudging it.
You can find Palestinians who will say that they want peace or even coexistence.
But for them to specifically recognize the implications, what it means, that there's no return into the sovereign territory of the state of Israel.
That if you live in Gaza and if you live in Ramallah, you're not a refugee from Palestine.
You are where you are and you need to build your future there.
And you don't continue to consider yourself in an endless limbo until the Jewish state is gone.
Very few people, even when they're living in London, are willing to say that.
I actually count them.
And John knows.
And by the way, one of the ways that I promoted is by participating here and platforming.
Anyone who says these things clearly should get all the support in the world.
At one point, people told me, like I said, they should get all the support, you know, not UNRWA, not that, But someone told me, but there's only a few of them.
I was like, doesn't matter.
They should get the billions because they have the right vision.
Even if it's four people who get the billion and a half dollars, I don't care because they're the ones who have the right vision.
So step one, be very clear on the vision, be very specific, and no cutting corners.
Step two, remove all the elements that undermine this vision.
So we talked about Iran and the extremists, but the book, The War of Return, is about the indulgence of the West, the funding of UNRWA, like John said, the closing of the eyes to how even the so-called moderate PA continues to We're good to
the notion that there will be no return, that they're not refugees, and that they're going to live next to the Jewish state.
So begin to remove funding, support, legitimacy from any organization that undermines this vision.
And step three, try to bring in whatever possible forces, such as modern Arab states that have a pro-Israel, pro-Zionist vision of what it means to be an Arab and Muslim, to help support and sustain an Arab-Palestinian identity to help support and sustain an Arab-Palestinian identity that wants to live next to a Jewish state rather than based on its negation.
That's my three-step process for peace.
And then I say, and it will take however long it takes.
There is a proverb, a saying of the Jewish sages that says that you will not finish the job, but it doesn't give you the right to not do it.
So even if something might not happen in your lifetime or immediately, it doesn't mean that as a result you stop doing it.
So I work towards that vision.
However long it takes.
All the time that I spend writing against UNRWA and the Western indulgence and the feeding of it comes from the fact that I'm actually trying to get to peace.
I'm actually trying to remove what I find is one of the biggest obstacles.
And maybe I'll end with this thing.
Over the years, as I went to European capitals and I told them, you're feeling all smug about yourselves.
You're funding UNRWA. But Ultimately, my people will pay for it in blood.
You're not going to pay for it in Paris or in London, but we will pay for it because you keep funding and telling Palestinians in Gaza, 75% of Gaza's residents are registered as if they're still refugees from Palestine.
You're basically telling them day in, day out, don't build your future in Gaza.
Don't make Gaza into the Dubai of the Levant.
But keep waiting for the day when Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.
You're making this, and you're making it worse, and we will pay for it.
And I told them, look, there's a difference between doing good and feeling good.
It's a difference in public policy and foreign policy and in parenting for that matter.
A lot of things might feel good, you know, funding UNRWA, giving money, but they don't do good.
And actually doing good often means doing things that don't feel good.
It means confronting the PA on issues of return and the Martyrs Fund and their vision.
And it requires doing things that don't feel good, but will finally do good.
And that's what I'm trying to encourage Western policymakers to do.
Stop indulging the vision of From the River to the Sea.
And start to say the clear things that will allow the Palestinian people to move forward, to understand that they can have a constructive vision, and make sure they are supported, make sure that Israel knows that this is the vision, and go in that direction, support them.
And that's really the only way to get to peace.
What is happening right now is just going to ensure that the conflict continues forever.
And, you know, there are signs of optimism.
And you mentioned Mansour.
We talked about Mansour Abbas.
We talked about the Palestinians who actually are citizens of Israel.
We talked about the Abram Accords, where the Arab neighbors of Israel are recognizing that vision and are opening trade agreements with Israel and support agreements that are Zionistic in nature.
And one of the things we didn't talk about is the de-radicalization that took place in Saudi Arabia.
We found out after 9-11 that the most radical Elements of jihad that leveled the World Trade Center was this Wahhabi schools in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi Arabian government actually went out and de-radicalized them.
Any final comments?
John?
Do you want to go first, Dr.
Wolf?
Just to say that, again, I think we're at a moment of peril.
I think there are dangers.
I do my best to try to find optimism and the path forward in all of this.
And really, I want to thank you, John, for your courage and your constructive specificity and for being clear.
And, you know, I've seen you get attacked again and again and again, and you're not budging.
And I love that because I must say, these days I find that it's actually the...
The one that is, it's not an easy position to take, but I think it's mentally and morally easier.
Rather than everyone that's like waffling about, just being clear and anyone who attacks you, you just tell them, go away.
This is my view.
I'm going to continue.
I draw a lot of hope from that.
And I just want to say thank you for that.
Well, thank you.
I mean, I think my vision is very much a futurist vision and it's very much based upon human progress and economic development as the cornerstones of the future for Palestinian people, for the region more generally.
What they have in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Riyadh and Tel Aviv is these amazing Middle Eastern metropolises.
And I think it is quite plausible that if we really set our minds to it and set our hearts to it, honestly, truthfully, we can build an amazing version of Gaza, which will be a metropolis to contend with, perhaps the Singapore of the West, perhaps a second Dubai.
But that prosperity and that growth Can also encompass the West Bank, right?
Nablus can be a beautiful modern city.
Ramallah can be a beautiful modern city.
The Palestinian state can be a wealthy, first-world, dignified nation.
And if in a hundred years from now, our descendants are listening back to this and that's what's normal to them, if that's what's normal to them, you know, prosperity, coexistence, humanism, humanitarianism, if that's what's normal to them, then we've succeeded.
And if, on the other hand, if in a hundred years' time we're still fighting about who owns this damn land, Then we failed.
Fine.
Fine.
Then perhaps we will fail.
Perhaps I will fail.
But at the very least, I'm going to try my best to advance the vision of prosperity, equality, humanity, human decency, and peace that the region needs.
John Aziz and Dr.
Will, thank you so much.
And John, again, thank you for your courage and both of you for your integrity.
Thank you.
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